The idea behind Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is pretty simple – break programming work down into bite-sized chunks, and put it in front of a large workforce that can do the work quickly and cheaply. Part of the challenge of that is making it easy for requesters to create the bites that workers are chewing on. The new categorization app from Amazon removes some of the hurdles of creating HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) that ask workers to pick the best category for items. The result could make the crowdsource coding marketplace even more usable and popular.
Creating a request for Mechanical Turk isn’t overly difficult, but it takes a bit of time editing HTML and answering a lot of questions for which first-time users don’t have a lot of context – for example, deciding the qualifications for workers, or whether they need to be “masters” to take on a task.
Amazon is streamlining all that with the Categorization App by making assumptions about what its users would want, providing suggested pricing and helping to create the form that workers will see.
Right now, Amazon is providing an app only
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